Join us on Twitter and IRC (#ludumdare on Afternet.org) for the Theme Announcement!

Thanks everyone for coming out! For the next 3 weeks, we’ll be Playing and Rating the games you created.You NEED ratings to get a score at the end. Play and Rate games to help others find your game.We’ll be announcing Ludum Dare 36’s August date alongside the results.

New Server: Welcome to the New (less expensive) Server! Find any problems? Report them here.

About HybridMind

I'm Dave Evans, aka HybridMind and I've been participating here since Ludum Dare 11 back in April 2008.

Ludum Dare is largely responsible for getting me back into my childhood dream of game development and I started my own game studio in January 2009 called Hybrid Mind Studios. I currently focus on making fun and original games using Flash and Unity.

Jonathan Whiting says ...

Theres some good graphics in this (I love the protagonist in particular), and the basic mechanics have a good solid feel to it. Sadly the gameplay feels a bit too broken in a few too many ways (no compeling goal, no reason not to just eat people immediately, unforgiving pure random spawns, etc. etc.) for it to be especially fun.

Gilvado says ...

Enjoyed it. Think it would have been more fun with a less brutally punishing score system. I have no idea how you got that 6000 in the screenshot! Or maybe I just suck at it... Either way, I think that removing the part where it subtracts from your score and giving the game a time limit (2 or 3 minutes) with saved scores would have worked better. Gas trucks could still subtract points, or perhaps stun you for a while. Just my 2 cents :).

jhauberg says ...

I found it hard to eat the people, as i just couldn't get used to having to be at/on them before pressing the eat button (eating made you stand still).

Besides that little thing, it was smooth and overall a decent little game :)

mathias says ...

He, okay, was fun. If you hold down alt after you jumped you automagically eat the person that escapes from the wrek - easy 6k points :)

Orangy Tang says ...

Not bad! Those gas trucks crush rather nicely. :)

Hamumu says ...

I gave you a bonus Towlr point for the extremely ruthless scoring. Fun and cool game, except as others said, the scoring just makes it cruel and unusual. Once I got to around 50 cars crushed, the game became an endless stream of gas trucks with occasional cars interspersed. It was literally impossible to not land on the gas trucks! So, yeah, some balancing would be cool... and a way to win and/or lose instead of just endlessly heading deeper into despair.

dave1 says ...

Good game. Simple controls but fun to try to eat people. Scoring system tough, I had trouble staying out of negative.

dertom says ...

Nice game! Especially at the beginning when it was possible to handle it. Later when it gets impossible to not crash the gas-truck it gets a bit frustrating. But...good job

midwinter says ...

The old 'crush/grab' combo really racks up the score.

Doches says ...

I agree with Gilvado; a little score tweaking and some game scaffolding (levels?) would turn this from an amusing demo into a fun little game.

Devon says ...

I love the walking and jumping animations. This game was pretty fun.

erik says ...

Pretty nice. It definitely triggers some rampage nostalgia. I'd love to play a more finished version. One touch that might have been nice is if you copied the crushed cars to the background and kept them around instead of having them disappear. It took me a little while to figure out that there is a difference between crushing a car by walking into it vs jumping on it. Also, nice animations.

demonpants says ...

Once I got up over 10,000 and 233 vehicles crushed I quit, not sure why everyone said it was hard. :-) Very fun, but they're right that eventually it becomes too difficult (i.e. impossible) to avoid gas trucks.

increpare says ...

Hm...what this game needs is feedback, I think, of the visual sort. There's a big disconnect between the scoring and the visual element. One can happily jump about forever and not realize that one is being scored in any particular way. Of course there was this time-constraint, but I'd say if you want to develop this in any way, that's the first area I'd recommend you work on.

ondrew says ...

I'm just jealous I didn't came up with the concept of a giant monster crushing cars and eating people. I thoroughly enjoyed the game.

The scoring is quite sneaky. Before I knew it, it was deep in negative numbers.

Plus the animations are really good. I'm amazed you pulled it of in 48 hours.

jlnr says ...

Haha, a bit too simplistic but that monster is adorable :P The oldschool look works well.

I packaged a Mac bundle at http://www.raschke.de/julian/temp/CoMuTor-mac.zip if anyone else needs it.

dstrysnd says ...

Nice game. More feedback when things hurt you would be good. Sprites are awesome.

Archive for the ‘LD #13 – Roads – 2008’ Category

First of all, thanks so much to everyone who left feedback to me in the ratings area. I have taken a bunch of the suggestions that people made and have worked more on improving CoMuTor in the past 2 weeks. Here is the latest work in progress of a post compo version of CoMuTor. The readme file contains all the changes that I made so far based on my own and others feedback. I welcome further feedback in the comments on this post for anyone that liked CoMuTor enough to try and play it again. I’m just having fun working on aspects of polishing and modifying this silly little game. I look forward to more Ludum Dares!!

You are a monster who has decided you will take out your aggression on the morning commuters. You can crush cars and SUVs with abandon as long as you land squarely on them with your jump move. You must be mindful of the dangerous GAS trucks! Keep away from those at all costs and let them safely leave the screen. Every car or SUV that escapes your wrath and flees the left of the screen costs you the same amount of negative points as if you had crushed them with a fatal jump move. After each vehicle is destroyed it’s inhabitants flee in panic. You can chase them down and eat them. Don’t let vehicles run into you though as this will also cost you score as well. The game speed will continue to increase with every 10 vehicles destroyed. Since you are an invincible monster you are merely playing for a positive score until you retire from your activities.

Managed to cram some form of “game” into it but it definitely didn’t turn out how I meant it given all the triage and feature cuts I had to make both in programming and art. I had an awesome time though just the same. Can’t wait to play everyone’s entries!

CoMuTor finally has three types of vehicles. Given time constraints I am really simplifying the art style so that I will have some small hope of making this a game by the deadline. I am also looking for gameplay that will fit within the deadline at this point too.

My new simple plan is that vehicles move right to left and that you can attack them and jump on them. I’m not sure yet how I will work the aspect of them running into you. Will that hurt you if you aren’t flip attacking them? Questions questions….

Well, as the clock ticks down and I find myself with less than 22 hours left in the competition I am trying to keep my spirits AND energy up. While I am pleased enough with the work I’ve done, I have worked much more slowly than I wanted. Not sure what this will mean for the adventures of CoMuTor but only time will tell.

Here is a “tech” demo if anyone wants to check out my progress so far. You can basically move CoMuTor all around and jump and perform his flip car attack though sadly there are no cars yet.

I’ve been working like mad since my last post at trying to mock up some CoMuTor animation tiles to have something to work with the soon to be written game logic. I always forget how long animation takes and am hoping that these placeholders won’t become permanent as far the deadline goes…. we shall see!

Here is a detail of my Tile Studio CoMuTor project:

Here is the larger image of even more tiles:

I have to draw some final frames of a CoMuTor attack where you reach down and fling cars up into the air and/or a smash attack as well.

Progress? Well, it has been SLOW. Last night after the theme was announced I must admit I was quite stumped. I couldn’t even remember if I had voted for roads or not. I knew that this time around I wanted to pick a game scope that I could pull off in the allotted time. All the immediate ideas I had were way to ambitious though and I felt like I was merely wading through game ideas that were either too complex or just not interesting to me to put the energy into in order to accomplish them in the timeframe. Also, I admit I was blindsided by not being able to get past thinking about cars instead of roads. So, I basically took last night to let the ideas seep and the subconscious work on it. I played a bunch of Left 4 Dead with two friends and another Ludum Dare steam group member who was also (procrastinating?) like me.

That was a lot of fun, but anyway I digress! I went to bed late and uncertain. I loaded my subconsious up prior to bed by browsing hundreds of google images for “roads” looking for inspiration. I then slept about 6 hours but had no dreams about roads. Before sleep I had a few ideas running around in my head but nothing felt “right”. I was thinking about a mailbox baseball game but couldn’t decide on perspective. I was thinking about a garbage collecting game but decided it would be too ambitious. So, this morning after a bunch of coffee I was suddenly hit by a vision and sketched the following:

And thus, CoMuTor was born. Basically Rampage + Gridlock = CoMuTor. I feel that I just *might* be able to pull off this idea in the time remaining. Still a lot of details to work out but basically I’m thinking that the idea will be as follows:

You are CoMuTor a monster that for some unknown reason have appeared downtown during rush hour and must battle your way out through gridlocked traffic to the suburbs and then the country. Of course you will get to smash and battle many things along the way as any “Rampage” type game should allow. Why are you a monster in the city? Umm.. why not? 😉

I will be using Ruby and the Gosu Gamedev Library developed by Julian Raschke (who participates here at LD sometimes) for my language and codelibs just like on my LD11 – Minimalist entry. I’ll probably use sfxr for the sound. I may try bazaar for source control (i’m more used to subversion but the syntax is similar enough.) I’ve got Tile Studio for my sprites. I’ve got audacity for any sound work I may need. I think that is about it.

Here is my workspace too. Crummy photo I know. Also, I’ve moved recently and this is the best area I could really cobble together in time for the compo.

This will be my second time participating in the insanity that is Ludum Dare. I was here for LD11 – Minimalist before. Since people are posting a few thoughts about lessons learned or at least things to be cognizant of during the competition I felt I’d add my own as well:

My personal quest this time will be to leave a LOT more time to actually make the game ‘fun’. I didn’t do very well on pacing last time around and while I was really happy with the art, style and environmental aspects of my ‘game’ it really fell short on play testing time and game play.

As a practical example of what I mean, most of the negative feedback my ‘final’ deadline entry received over the week of voting / rating I had already resolved on my own within hours of the submission deadline. This of course couldn’t be uploaded as the final entry being past the close of competition. Point being, given time to play it (which I honestly hadn’t really had a chance to do very much of) a lot of issues become quite obvious. If I had paced even a few more hours of actual playing time into the competition schedule I believe that my entry would have been a lot more fun to play for others.

That is what I will be keeping in my mind for LD13. Make sure to play your own game or have thought out the game play as early as possible. I don’t want to get bogged down in all the polish of art, style, look and feel and forget that a game should have a game in it and actually be fun to play.